Heartwarming Video Highlights Struggles of Kids From Farmworker Families

A bookmobile helps put migrant students on a different path.

Apr 23, 2016·

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and social justice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

Onions, lettuce, strawberries, apples, the almonds used to make almond milk. More than a million men and women pick those and plenty of other crops across the country, often under inhumane working conditions. The workers may move from farm to farm or state to state, following the harvest. And that makes getting an education a struggle for their kids.

“The conditions were pretty terrible. I once told someone that I learned how to fight with a knife long before I learned how to ride a bicycle,” Storm Reyes, a Native American woman who grew up living in a camp for migrant farm workers in Washington state in the 1960s, told StoryCorps back in 2014.

Now the organization, which captures stories to foster connections and empathy, has turned Reyes’ experience into an animated video short. The clip, released last week, brings to life how she worked picking fruit and flowers alongside her family. Then one day a bookmobile came to the fields, and as we see in the clip, the mini library ignited her love of learning.

The educational disenfranchisement of migrant kids such as Reyes spurred President Lyndon B. Johnson to authorize the creation of the federal Migrant Education Program in 1966. Last year, the federal government provided more than $364 million in grants to 47 states to support programs geared toward ensuring migrant kids get an education despite how frequently they move.

California, which is the fifth-biggest producer of food and agricultural commodities in the world, is home to the nation’s largest number of migrant students. Given the transitory nature of farmwork, it’s tough to get an accurate count of how many migrant students there are in the United States, but the most recent count in California is approximately 125,000, José Morales, director of the Kern County Office of Migrant Education, told TakePart. That’s believed to represent roughly one-third of migrant students nationally.

“Along with closing the learning loss gap due to frequent moves, the children need advocates,” Morales said. “Our role is to ensure that migrant students have that advocacy and that their parents gain the tools to advocate for their children as well.”

Kern County is one of the largest agriculture producers in California, and it’s home to the Weedpatch Camp made legendary by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Instead of the mostly white “Okies” who fled the Dustbowl in the 1930s, today’s migrant workers are predominantly Latino. Although recent research found that Latino parents value college more than other demographic groups do, some undocumented workers worry that sending their kids to school will reveal their status, said Morales.

While fostering and supporting efforts to enroll migrant kids in public schools, Morales’ team and local teachers have long worked to provide books to children living in camps, particularly during the long, hot summers. “As one of our outreach extended study services, we still provide books to as many migrant students as possible,” Morales said.

The office uses funds from the Migrant Education Program to purchase literature, he said, but it doesn’t have a physical bookmobile like the one seen in Reyes’ StoryCorps video.

Reyes’ story has a happy ending. She ended up graduating from high school and worked in public libraries for about 30 years. That’s an experience that’s still all too rare for migrant students, however. Morales said the biggest challenge continues to be low high school graduation rates. By some estimates, 40 to 60 percent of migrant students nationally will drop out. Despite legislation protecting the educational rights of undocumented children, “there is still hesitation to reach out and ‘take’ these services,” Morales said.

Nevertheless, it’s heartwarming to see how Reyes’ face lights up when she first peeps through the window of the bookmobile. “It gave me the courage to leave the camps. That’s where the books made the difference,” she says in the video.